On slaps in the face and banging heads against the wall
A teacher
This is another post that I never wanted to write but I feel I could not go on blogging without getting it out of my system.
As part of my easing my way back into the blogosphere, I felt I had to write an account of my previous year and my feelings and thoughts about my year as a secondary school teacher. I thought I had given a fairly honest and definitely not very flattering summary of this experience.
Back in December, I received an email from a a fellow teacher. This is the sentence that blew me: “… I can see a very kind, good-hearted teacher who on a personal level gets on very well with the kids. One who started the year with vague ideas, without tools and a concept, and was consumed by the fact that the kids didn’t tolerate this – if at all.” (Translation by me)
He also went on to say that I misrepresent myself in this blog – using it to show myself, and my failures, in a better light. What this says to me is that although I am a nice person, I am useless as a teacher. Needless to say, I was gutted.
Am I a good teacher, or am I just fooling myself, and you? I don’t think I’m fooling myself at all – I don’t think I’m a good teacher. Am I using this blog to promote the idea of me being a good teacher? Not even that, I believe. I definitely don’t use this forum to intentionally mislead or deceive you, kind reader.
Is my presentation of events one-sided? Well of course it is, it’s my blog, and I can only write about what I think is going on. Do I believe that I am right? Of course not. Is it important to be right all the time? Who decides that you are right or not? There are as many perceptions of events as people experiencing them.
What is a good teacher? And is it possible to be a good teacher to everyone? Parents – 9 out of 10 want you to help their children to pass the exam.
Admin – 9 out of 10 will want you to produce great final and/or language exam results so that money, new students, reputation come flooding in.
Students – 2 out of ten will love you whatever you do, 2 will hate you whatever you do, 3 will want you to be stricter, 3 will want you to be more lenient.
What do I love about teaching?
I love being part of a community with students and teachers. That’s it. It’s not the new methods, it’s not the technology, it’s not the great exam results. It’s not even English as a language or subject. I love English and I love being a pretty fluent speaker and connoisseur of this amazing tool. But do I teach because I like English? I definitely got into the teaching profession because I thought I wanted to share my passion for the language with my students. I still very much want to share the passion, but not for English anymore. My passion for learning is what I want to share and English is a fantastic tool in this endeavour. I use it and I do want to be better at it, and that’s why I need methods and tools that make it more effective.
Do I have a concept?
No, should I? Having a concept helps you deliver material. Having a concept helps you produce great things and bring fantastic results. This is what teaching is. And I have no problem with it. There were times that I envied people who had concepts. I thought I had to develop some as well. Then I realised that I couldn’t. The only concept I have is that learning happens when you find the thing that makes you tick – when you have the time, the energy and the motivation to keep looking, starting, ditching and starting again. Enjoying the process for what it is: a messy, chaotic jumble full of dead ends, false starts, tears and frustrations.
There are all these studies about what good teaching is and how you can get from being a novice to an expert teacher. I realised that I would never be an expert teacher. An expert teacher does the right thing. This means accepting the concept of “the right thing”. I don’t know what the right thing is and I don’t really care if it exists. My favourite Hungarian rock band has a sentence that rings in my ears all the time:
Szeretek, szeretek I love, I love
Okosan szeretek Cleverly I love
Először nem túl nagy First not too big
Dolgokat szeretek Are the things I love
Hanem csak kicsiket Alas, small things
Keresek szeretni I look for to love
Ha megvan eldobom And when I find them, I dith them
Szeretek keresni It’s the search I like (Translation by me)
“… strive to become the teacher you are…” (Chuck Sandy)
This does not elevate me to any level of superiority. I don’t think this makes me better than others; on the contrary. But as Chuck Sandy’s fantastic talk at the first iTDi web conference reminded many of us: you have to strive to become the teacher you are. I want to be the teacher I am; I don’t want me and my teaching to be two different entities. I can’t and don’t want to put on a mask before entering the classroom. I don’t have pedagogical concepts, I have values as a person and not as a teacher, and I should be able to stand up for and represent those values in and outside the classroom.
I used to make strong and sweeping critical judgments about what teachers were doing in class, and had no patience for people wasting my time. Then this all changed. I watch teachers; I look for how comfortable they are in their classes. I believe that that’s the key factor. Teachers who are confident and relaxed in their classroom cannot go wrong. They will make mistakes and those mistakes can have temporary negative effects, but in the long run, every mistake is reevaluated and reconsidered. Everyone witnessing that mistake (from whatever perspective) will have a different recollection about it. The only key is that the mistake has to be called a mistake and has to be analysed. Not by a random observer but by the person who committed and the person who suffered the consequences of the mistake.
And the story does not end here…. unfortunately
So far this was a mere exchange of Facebook messages. It hurt and I didn’t really know how to deal with it. Three weeks or so later, to add insult to injury, the whole affair was pretty widely publicised on a very popular blog. The whole affair was pretty much presented to the readers as a warning for novice teachers. Of course no names were mentioned, but it was an obvious reference to my destructive activities and conclusion presented in a patronising know-it-all manner. In the post I was pretty much described as a novice with a Dead Poets’ Society mission complex who bangs his head against the wall instead of using it more wisely, and a touchy little fellow who gets upset because his students don’t appreciate him. Although the post made many valid points, it relied exclusively on intuition, fragmentary information from students and the author’s unshakable belief in his infallibility. Well, I lack that kind of wisdom.
“Banging one’s head against the wall will hurt the head not the wall,” he says.
I just wish there were more people banging their heads against the wall. Maybe more people would hear it. We are quite a few broken heads away from change. Yes, my head has been cracked and fractured in the process (feeling a bit dizzy and concussed) but the reverberations of those bangs are still resonating in a few ears.
“I believe that there are serious values behind the walls of classrooms in public education,” he says.
I believe those values are the students themselves and whatever the education system does not manage to ruin. I don’t think a system can have values, it is the people working in it – good teachers and good students. I believe the author of this article is one of these teachers, I admire and greatly appreciate what he has done for (ICT) education in Hungary. This is why it’s especially hard to get over this unjustified criticism.
To put an end to the whole unpleasant affair …
I am NOT a great teacher. Admitting this and trying to do something about it however, makes me a not absolutely lost cause, I believe. The minute I start believing that I am a great teacher is when I will have to stop. That’s when I am going to say, I have achieved what I wanted, now I can tend to the vineyard I have been dreaming of. I’m afraid the vineyard will have to wait until my next incarnation.
All I can hope after all, is that I have done more good than damage in the last 20 years of meddling and peddling in ELT.
This is the last post of this kind, I promise. With 2011 out the window, a New Year, a bit less self flagellation, a bit more thinking, and a bit more practical stuff to come.
“One never simply becomes a teacher. A teacher is always in the process of becoming. This is because teaching, by definition, is a transformative act and in the best classrooms this transformation works on every level. The longer I teach the more I realize that becoming a teacher means being willing to share with others that self who one is at this particular moment in time .” Chuck Sandy
As Badly Drawn Boy suggests in this fabulous song: “There is a chance that there is no rulebook for this love”
Multiliteracies #evomlit
Vance wrote a post about the different definitions of multiliteracies. I often start reading things with creating a wordle of it and then narrowing it down to the 50 top words. This is an interesting way of figuring out the gist of any longer piece. It also keeps your brain busy trying to figure out why and how certain words relate to the topic. Below is the wordle I created from the post.
I am getting more and more excited about the course.
Last Sunday I was lurking about in the chatroom and I loved listening to people talking about their experiences and what they had been up to. Eventually I also had to floor and I felt a bit awkward but I quickly managed to overcome it. I had a really good time and Barbara Sakamoto‘s Adobe Connect session was a perfect closing to this awesome Sunday afternoon.
I will try to be there at Nik Peachey’s session this evening.
I did manage to join Nik and 40 other teachers yesterday. It was great to see Nik and I really enjoyed the backchannel conversation with the other teachers. I love the natural tone in which Nik talks to people. He might be talking to a room full of people or a small bunch around a dinner table, he is calm (at least on the outside), relaxed, friendly, informative and good to listen to. He always makes sure to highlight how and why each tool he is introducing might make learning more fun, interesting for the students and useful for the teacher.
Lesson learnt: It was interesting to see that most of the participants in this talk were people I had not really met before, i.e. they had no idea who I was and just using the Twitter handle is not really enough. When you sign in a chatroom is worth giving your full name or just your first name and the country you come from so that people know how to address you.
Merry Christmas
Flickr @visualpanic
I have two new posts I have been working on. However, I decided to postpone them a bit. It’s Christmas and the thing I like most about it is that it gives you a great opportunity to say Thank You to people you might not have thanked in the year.
This has been a tough year and without you it would have been even tougher.
Here are few things I thank you for:
THOUGHTS – you shared and made me think about
HAPPINESS – being a part of n amazing group of people
AMAZEMENT – at how many wonderful people there are who are happy to share
NOVELTY – new tools, new toys, new ideas, new relationships
KNOWLEDGE – I have learnt more from you than years and years of wearing out school benches
YARNS – your stories that made me laugh and cry and think and act
OPTIMISM – looking forward to the treasure trove you filled every day with gems
UNKNOWN – showing the known in a new light, opening doors on thinks not known before
PROUD TO BE AN
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WHERE IN THE WORLD ARE YOU?
